An Experimental Study Of Storytelling And Humor In Instagram Carousel Content In Higher Education

In the digital era, higher education institutions increasingly rely on social media, particularly Instagram, to engage prospective students in their recruitment process. The carousel feature on Instagram allows for more narrative and visual message delivery, making it a promising medium for digital storytelling and humour-based content strategies. This study examines how storytelling content combined with humor, compared with storytelling without humor, affects narrative engagement and interaction intention on a university Instagram account. Using a between-subject experimental design (1×2), 154 valid responses were collected from students of the Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Muhammadiyah Surabaya, who were randomly exposed to one of the two carousel stimuli. Data were analyzed using ANOVA and Hayes' PROCESS Macro (Model 4). The results show that storytelling content with humor produces significantly higher narrative engagement than storytelling without humor. Narrative Engagement, in turn, positively affects engagement intention and fully mediates the relationship between storytelling format and interaction intention, as the direct effect of storytelling format on interaction intention is not significant. These findings extend narrative transportation theory to the context of higher education social media marketing and offer practical implications for campus-content strategies.